SOURCE: "The Two Noble Kinsmen," in Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins, Liverpool University Press, 1978, pp. 166-215.

In the following essay, Thompson compares The Two Noble Kinsmen, scene by scene, with its source, Chaucer 's The Knight's Tale, arguing that Shakespeare and Fletcher adapted Chaucer's tale in significantly different ways. Thompson goes on to suggest possible reasons why the two playwrights used the source material in the ways they did.

This play, written in collaboration with John Fletcher about 1612-13, is the only other play in which Shakespeare's use of Chaucer is as direct and extensive as it is in Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, this debt is acknowledged in the Prologue:

[our play] has a noble breeder and a pure, A learned, and a poet never went More famous yet 'twixt Po and silver Trent. Chaucer, of all admir'd, the story gives, There constant to eternity it...